You don't see the flaw in outsourcing you opinion to the experts?

You would rather I post some peer-reviewed journal than discuss things on a more personal level that we can all be involved in?

So you disagree that TV and video games are in any way bad for you? You yourself said you used to play the majority of the day, and you have also mentioned your emotional problems, don't you think they may be connected? I know a lot of the "emotional disorders" I have are from these modern world influences on my mind.

They did a study in Germany where they offered to pay people to turn off the TV for a year, no one made it more than 6 months. They were lonely and depressed, it's addict behavior. Through my past I have learned (the hardest way) all about unhealthy relationships with objects, and TV and video games are both possibilities.

You guys keep posting your "proof"and maybe one day you will figure out that truth is relative, and that all that 'the experts know the answers' shit is mind-fuck. You're a very smart guy, yourself and Rhizo. I think you're likely smarter than me, can't you use your own mind to make your own conclusion about this topic?

(January 20, 2010 at 8:39 am)Pippy Wrote: I don't want to post peer-reviewed studies, because they are able to be untrue.

LMAO! As opposed to...non-peer reviewed studies??? Are you f*cking serious???

You have to be kidding me...

Either you think that the ravings of some lunatic are sufficient to prove your point, or you've found that all peer reviewed studies disagree with your point and you don't want to back down form your assertion!

Quote:You don't see the flaw in outsourcing you opinion to the experts?

You would rather I post some peer-reviewed journal than discuss things on a more personal level that we can all be involved in?

Flaw? No. Opinions are opinions. Facts as determined by numerous studies are facts. You present some facts that back up your assertions, and I promise you Pippy, I'll come to your side of the argument. In case you were wondering, "peer-review" doesn't mean some random media company based in New York City that just happens to have a website that agrees with your point of view. We want original studies, with the original conclusions, preferably written by the scientists who did them (the media have a way of putting any kind of "spin" on science...hence why I prefer it direct from the source).

Well gee Pippy since you polished my apple by callin' me smart I guess I'll just agree with you...

Nah, I still want SOME form of evidence that doesn't amount to, "I think this, therefore it must be true.." or, "This is my experience and it brings me to this conclusion..."

Vegging out in front of the TV can be bad for you but it isn't special in that regard; anything can become habit forming and bad for you in excess.

Rhizo

Very true Rhizo.

I would love to produce this 'evidence', but I don't know where to look or who to trust. I have seen a lot of stuff in these well respected journals and publications that I think is a load of hooey. As a proper freethinker (but not allowed in a freethinkers organization), I try to come to my own conclusions within my own sphere of understanding. It may be smaller than the understanding held by 'scientists', but it is un-fuck-with-able. If I had a good friend, who I knew in real life, and he or she was a 'scientist', and they knew some interesting facts, I would be happy to hear them out, and adopt the information. But I can't afford to base my opinions on something as subjective as the ideas of strangers.

I have read some articles about TV being good for you, and TV being bad for you. I would rather talk about my and your guys extensive personal experience with TV watching and its effects. Seems more constructive.

I like that you were offended by the website, I guess you didn't get the joke. They knew they would end up on the infamous FBI Disinformant list, so they named they forum (and books) Disinformation. It would be foolish to assume they are lying to us, and more likely that they have a functioning sense of humor. Go once a day, I guarantee there are few places on the net with more interesting news. Certainly can't be any worse than Fox or MSNBC.

I think you guys should base you opinions more on personal life experience, and less on what others tell you to believe. There is a lot of untruth out there. A lot.

Thanks.

Pippy,

I think you misunderstand the peer-review process. The fact that peer-review works so well in establishing repeatable consistent findings is that the people doing the reviews will do their best to find flaws in your premises, tests, and findings. Only after the document is vetted, it gets published, where other scientists that weren't included in the peer review process can go over your tests and findings again with a fine tooth comb and repeat your tests to see if their results are the same.

That system produces a lot more solid evidence then any personal experience or gut feeling can ever give you.

Well, according to my personal experience:

1. God exists as a little bald chinese kid
2. I was born with a tail that the doctors removed and kept secret from my parents
3. Astral projection is a reality
4. I projected into an astral homunculus shaped like a robot
4. I contacted aliens from a distant planet and while in congress with them they implanted a sybiote who has since taken control of my mind
5. Souls are real and my body is nothing more than a vehicle that I travel about in.
6. My father created me as a cybernetic organism and has yet to tell me
7. I can heal people through touch

There are many more kooky ideas that have been born out by my personal experience, 7 being the most interesting in my opinion. So, I've learned to check my experience against observable reality and have learned to trust peer-reviewed studies conducted by scientists rather than books obtained from the metaphysical section of Powell's bookstore.

When I was in college I took a critical thinking class that taught me how to judge sources, I would suggest that you look into learning more about critical thinking.

Rhizo

(January 21, 2010 at 8:12 am)Pippy Wrote: I would love to produce this 'evidence', but I don't know where to look or who to trust. I have seen a lot of stuff in these well respected journals and publications that I think is a load of hooey. As a proper freethinker (but not allowed in a freethinkers organization), I try to come to my own conclusions within my own sphere of understanding. It may be smaller than the understanding held by 'scientists', but it is un-fuck-with-able. If I had a good friend, who I knew in real life, and he or she was a 'scientist', and they knew some interesting facts, I would be happy to hear them out, and adopt the information. But I can't afford to base my opinions on something as subjective as the ideas of strangers.

"As subjective"??? Guess what Pippy? You friends' thoughts are also subjective, as are your own ideas! Freethinking isn't about using your own sphere of understanding to come up with conclusions, but about not depending on dogma. Listening to the the scientific community is a very good form of free-thinking, as most of the time, the more studies that are done, the better the research, and the more conclusive the idea. These people are also experts, who have a greater understanding than you do in the specific area they research. I'll probably never be able to truly understand or comprehend the Big Bang or Quantum Mechanics, but I read the research and listen to popularisers of science explain it in a simplified way, and I accept it.

Sometimes you have to accept the things that are told to you by the people who know the most about them. If everyone followed your kind of free-thinking, progress would grind to a halt as people would go with their intuition rather than what the experiments tell us. You aren't earning any freethinking points by saying "I've seen a load of well respected journals and the papers are a load of hooey". Journals are usually very hard to get published in, and only papers that have been peer-reviewed and held up as the best research get into the best journals. If you think it's a load of hooey, you are well within your rights to think that, but your opinions won't reflect reality as presented by the numerous studies you dismiss.

Quote:I have read some articles about TV being good for you, and TV being bad for you. I would rather talk about my and your guys extensive personal experience with TV watching and its effects. Seems more constructive.

Every time one of us has told you that we don't feel hypnotised, or feel the symtoms you tell us we "should feel", you've gone on the offensive, telling us you are "flabbergasted" , that the symtoms are "unquestionable". Yet you produce no evidence to back up any of this; only your hearsay and stuff that our parents told us when we were children. So excuse me if we think that "personal experience" counts for nothing in terms of actual hard fact about what happens when we watch TV. Sure, talk about how we each feel individually, but there is no point in continuing the discussion without evidence being presented...

Quote:I think you guys should base you opinions more on personal life experience, and less on what others tell you to believe. There is a lot of untruth out there. A lot.

Science doesn't tell us what to believe, it tells us which explanation most closely resembles the truth. Whether you believe it or not is ultimately up to you, but you would be a fool not to follow the evidence provided by numerous studies, collaborative research, and the findings of peer-reviewed papers in journals. Unless you have some amazing omniscience-like insight into the issue, your personal experience can't be quantified, and is yours alone.

This type of talk coming from a known conspiracy theorist however, doesn't surprise me. You people regularly reject all reason and evidence in order to support and already drawn up conclusion that someone is telling a massive lie. It doesn't impress me, and I think I speak for most people here when I say that it certainly doesn't impress any of them.

Adrian and Pippy, respectively, having a similar argument:

(January 20, 2010 at 9:53 pm)Pippy Wrote: You don't see the flaw in outsourcing you opinion to the experts?

Do you see a flaw in going to builder when you want to build a house? I don't know how to build a house, i could learn, but this guy's been building them for 30 years, he's the expert.

Quote:You would rather I post some peer-reviewed journal than discuss things on a more personal level that we can all be involved in?

I'm confused as to why you are trying to compare a technical document with a discussion forum.

Quote:So you disagree that TV and video games are in any way bad for you? You yourself said you used to play the majority of the day, and you have also mentioned your emotional problems, don't you think they may be connected? I know a lot of the "emotional disorders" I have are from these modern world influences on my mind.

And what of the people without these emotional disorders who are fully emerged in the modern world? What of the people with emotional disorders who do not play games or watch tv? Once again you demonstrate your appalling lack of context.

Correlation is not causation either Pippy, it may be the case that these disorders existed, in the cases involving video games, before the person developed a bad habit. It seems more likely to me that the people who seek retreat from the world, whether by video games, fiction, etc are more likely to have done so based on some pre-existing problem rather than through the medium in question harming them.

Quote:They did a study in Germany where they offered to pay people to turn off the TV for a year, no one made it more than 6 months. They were lonely and depressed, it's addict behavior. Through my past I have learned (the hardest way) all about unhealthy relationships with objects, and TV and video games are both possibilities.

I just spent a good 10-15 minuets looking for an article of that description with various search parameters, there is nothing remotely close to the study you described in common articles, let alone scientific studies.

Now, you might not be lying... but i'm skeptical.

Quote:You guys keep posting your "proof"and maybe one day you will figure out that truth is relative, and that all that 'the experts know the answers' shit is mind-fuck. You're a very smart guy, yourself and Rhizo. I think you're likely smarter than me, can't you use your own mind to make your own conclusion about this topic?

Do you have any understanding of why we have specialisations and thus experts pippy? It's because there is not enough time in a lifetime to learn 1% of all of the jobs and subjects on the earth, if everyone was trying to do as you do, use their own limited and subjective knowledge and experiences to make statements about everything, if everyone was to focus on every problem they encountered then society would have never got anywhere, no expert scientists to observe and invent, no medical specialists with years of training and hundreds of saved lives under their belts, no teachers trained specifically to make learning easy and memorable for students, no architects designing houses, no accountants balancing books...

We have experts because we can't all know a great deal about everything, e have peer-review journals to reach a consensus amongst experts about the validity of the work as well as a set of standards that verifies and tests the methodologies involved. This scrutinous process may not be perfect, but it is by far the best method ever developed by our species for establishing expert consensus in a way that the public can easily access, a far better method than you trying to be an expert on everything, as if you think you have some level of understanding of these subjects that the experts do not.

You should remember that quoting experts alone is not a good enough test of the validity of the claim, you must also examine what the global community of experts on the subject had to say about their study, if they agreed or disagreed with the conclusions and the methodology and why.

It's easy to find an expert doctor that will support some unproven pseudo-science nonsense, but when you have the scope of thousands of researchers and practitioners who examine and review the claims then you are on your way to seeing all possible critiques and holes in a hypothesis as well as all the areas that it gets right.

(January 21, 2010 at 8:12 am)Pippy Wrote: ...what others tell you to believe. There is a lot of untruth out there. A lot.

It's a conspiracy I tells ya!!